Being Christian in the World
HE Metropolitan Anthony Bloom
(from talks given at Birmingham University in 1970)
 |
| Archbishop Iakovos with Martin Luther King Jr. |
[For more talks by Metropolitan Anthony you can visit the MAS Archive www.masarchive.org which also includes this series on Doubt and Questioning which was uploaded for easier access on YouTube @ http://tinyurl.com/doubtandquestioning ]
I should like to talk now of the situation of being a Christian in the world; and I should like to preface my remarks by saying that we have a tendency to exaggerate the meaning which we attach to the expression ‘the contemporary world’. The world is always contemporary to someone: at every moment it will be contemporary to a generation of people, and there are general rules that are human and historical which I believe can serve as a basis for our judgement and action. Another thing which I should like to underline is the fact that God is always contemporary. This we very often forget, trying by all sorts of theological efforts to make Him contemporary with us, when He is perfectly contemporary, needs no change to be Himself and to be up to date.
This being said, I take as the first starting point two stories of the Gospel which are too well known for me to describe them in detail – the stories of two storms on the Lake of Galilee. The scheme of these two stories is practically identical. The disciples leave the shore, they are caught up in a storm and they are confronted with the unexpected in the person of their Lord and of their God, Jesus Christ. In the first story the disciples left the shore, then they were caught up in the storm alone in their boat. Christ had remained behind, dismissing the crowds after the miracle of the multiplication of the bread and fish. Their only protection against the storm was the frail shell of their boat. They fought with all their energy, with all their skill, with all their courage, yet death was enveloping them on every side, pressing hard, trying to break through their precarious security. At a certain moment they saw, right in the middle of the storm, walking on the seas, blown around by the wind, Christ himself. They looked and saw and they cried out in fear because they knew it could not be Christ, they knew it was a ghost. Why? Because they knew that God, their God, their Master, their Teacher, stood for harmony, for peace, for salvation, for life, and there he was right in the middle of the storm which spelt death, disharmony and horror; it could not be God, because God’s presence could not be in harmony with what was going on.
This is the reaction we have so often, and we react as wrongly as the disciples when dramatic events occur in our lives. Whether it is history at large –wars and earthquakes – whether it is the small history in which we are involved – our own lives, our own families, our own religion, colour, group – if the presence of God is felt and is not accompanied by immediate harmony, by the coming of peace, by salvation, by the relief of pain and by the relief of anguish, we shout out that it is a ghost. He cannot be there. We forget that God is the Lord of the storm just as he is the Lord of the stillness, the serenity and the harmony of things.
I will leave this story at this point and take the next one, and come back to both. In this one we read that Christ has left the shore with his disciples. He is asleep in the prow of the boat; he is asleep comfortably, resting his head on a cushion. A storm springs up, death is abroad, fear enters and conquers the hearts of the disciples. They fight again within the precarious protection of the shell of the boat, and they feel that they are being defeated. Then they turn towards Him who is their salvation, or should be; and they see Him who should be their salvation completely indifferent, asleep, at rest, and – to add insult to injury – he is not only asleep but he has made himself comfortable with his head on a cushion.
This is what we accuse God of continuously. We never stop accusing him of that. We are fighting against death; anguish disrupts our lives; fear makes them unbearable; death is abroad, suffering is killing us, and God is not only there, indifferent, but in perfect comfort because he is beyond reach of these things. Are we fair and are we right? I will try to answer this question a little later. Let us go back to more features of the story.
In the first story, having cried out their fear, the disciples hear the Lord say ‘Fear not, it is I’. They hear a voice which is strangely like the familiar and loved voice of their master. And Peter acting once more quickly than he things, says, ‘If it is you, tell me to talk on the seas and join you’. And then, because Christ says ‘Yes, it is I, come’, Peter all of a sudden – because he has recognised Him who is life, who is meaning, who is harmony, in himself – of a sudden abandons the frail protection of their boat, and begins to walk and indeed he walks, and as long as he looks at Christ, and as long as his only desire is to be with Him to be at that point where God stands in the storm, he can walk. But suddenly he remembers himself. He remembers that he is a man of flesh and blood, that he has gravity, that he has never walked on the sea, never withstood the raging waves, that he will drown; and the moment he turns his gaze, his interest, his concern, on himself, he indeed begins to drown because he is still in that part of the storm where death is abroad.
In the case of the second story, the disciples feel defeated – death is there, they have no strength left, no hope, no peace left. Turmoil has overcome them completely; they turn to him, they awake him, perhaps even brutally, for their words are brutal. ‘For all you are, we are dead’. This is the translation which Moffatt gives of that passage. ‘For all you care, we are dead’. They don’t turn to him saying, ‘You are the Lord, a word of yours will be sufficient for us to be saved’. No, they recognise defeat, they accept the ruthlessness and indifference of God, they have no word for Him. What they want of this God become man who proves incapable of being a help and their salvation, if he can do nothing better, is to be in anguish, in despair, together with them and to die with them – not be drowned unconsciously, all unwitting of the oncoming defeat of life by death. And Christ turns away from them, brushes them away saying “How long shall I be with you, men of little faith?’ Then, turning to the storm, he commands the seas to be still and the wind to cease, projecting as it were, his own serenity, his own peace, his own stillness, his own harmony, on all things around Him. In the case of Peter as well as in the case of the other apostles, they had allowed the storm not only to rage around them, but to enter into them; the storm had become an internal experience; it had conquered. In Christ it remains outside himself; it is conquered. In a passage of St John’s Gospel, the Lord says ‘the Prince of the world has nothing in him which he can use to kill’. They are not His words but the implication is that He is free, He has overcome the world; he can project on it the measurement, the categories of eternity, stability, serenity, salvation, security, not the precarious and frail security of the little boat, but another security; not the peace, the naïve peace of those who say ‘That will never happen to me’, or console others by saying ‘Don’t worry it won’t happen to you’, but the peace of one who has said ‘It may happen, it will happen, it has happened, and yet because I have lost all human hope, I stand firm and unshaken on divine hope.’
I have said that Christ was at the point of a storm, at a certain point of the storm which we should reach in order to be with God in the storm; that Peter nearly drowned because he did not reach it. Where is this point? This point of the storm is not a point where there is no storm, it is what one calls the eye of the hurricane, it is the point where all conflicting forces meet and where an equipoise is reached because there is no violence – not because there is not tension, not because there is not tragedy, but because the tragedy and the tension have come to such a pitch that they meet so violently as to balance each other; they are at the point of breaking. This is the point where God stands, and when we think of God whom we accuse all the time, to whom we give from time to time a chance by saying ‘He must be right because he is God’ – this is the God who has chosen to stand at the breaking point of things, and this is why He can be respected, why we can treat Him with consideration, why we can believe in Him and not despise Him.
Now, where is this point? Long ago a man once stood in anguish, in despair, before the face of God and before the judgement of his friends. This man was called Job. He was afflicted with all that can afflict a man – bereavement, loss of all he possessed, loss of all that was dear, but more than this, more tragically than this, with the loss of understanding. He no longer could understand his God. Meaning had gone out of his life, and in his argument with God and in his argument with his friends, he stood for meaning and refused consolation; he refused to be consoled and god out of tragedy and anguish by a consoling, appeasing and false image of God and of his ways. He believed, indeed he knew a living God, and that one he could no longer understand. And at a certain moment, he says, ‘Where is the man that will stand between me and my judge, who will put his hand on my shoulder and on my judge’s shoulder; where is he that will step into the situation, take a place at the heart of the conflict, at the breaking point of the tension, stand between the two in order to re-unite them, and to make them one?’ He had a sense that only that could be the solution of his problem. Indeed of the problem of the meaning of tragedy, ultimately of the meaning of history. He had a foreboding that only that could be true, and that indeed happened. It happened when the Son of God became the Son of Man, when the Word of God became flesh, when Jesus came into the world, who being truly man, could put his hand on the man’s shoulders without destroying the man by the fire of divine touch , and who could without blasphemy and sacrilege, put his hand on the shoulder of God without being destroyed.
This is what we truly mean by Intercession. Christians spend their time interceding, and at times I listen to these intercessions with fear because to me intercession means an involvement that may spell death; and I am frightened when I hear a congregation of people intercede for one need after the other, piling up on their shoulders all the needs of the world just for the time Evensong lasts. After that they put it down on God’s shoulders, and they go out elevated with a new emotion.
About ten years ago I came back from India. I was asked in London to speak at a rather big meeting about hunger. I spoke about what I had seen and what had wounded me very deeply with all the passion and violence I am capable of. For a while the people sat and listened, then when we came out I stood at the west door shaking hands, and a lady came up to me and said ‘Thank you for the entertaining evening.’ That is intercession very often with us. We have spied a need, we have become aware of a tragedy, and then from the security of our living, we turn to God, and say ‘O Lord, haven’t you noticed that? What are you doing about it? And this? And that? Aren’t you forgetful of your duties to mankind? This is not intercession. Intercession is a Latin word which means to take a step that brings you to the centre of conflict, and in the image of Christ, in the person of Christ, we see that intercession means taking a step which is definitive – once and for all he becomes man, not for a while. And he doesn’t become a pleading advocate or a go-between equally different to the one on either side, who will go and find terms of agreement between the one and the other. He takes his stand in total, final solidarity between Man and God; turning to God, he is man and stands condemned; turning to men he is God and stands rejected. He must die. And his solidarity doesn’t go simply to the sweet selected few who will recognise him or believe in him. No, his solidarity goes to everyone. He is not God for the good versus the bad, the believers versus the unbelievers, or the creed or the colour of a nation, or of a social group. He has made himself solid with everyone. We discovered as exiled Russians in the early days of emigration when we had lost everything, when there was nothing left standing for us, when we were unwanted, rejected, despised, helpless, vulnerable to the utmost, we discovered we had also lost the God of the great cathedrals, the God of the beautifully engineered ceremonials. Where did we stand? When we looked at ourselves, we discovered that we had lost faith in ourselves, and very often self-respect. And then we discovered our God in a new way. We discovered that in Christ God has revealed himself as vulnerable, as helpless, as contemptible, as overcome and vanquished, as trodden under foot, as rejected, and we discovered that we had a God who was not ashamed of us, because he had made Himself sold with what we were, in our misery, in our deprivation, in our rejection, and also that we had no reason to be ashamed of a God who knew how to love to the extent that he was prepared to become one of us, to show by doing this that his faith in us was unshaken and that his respect of human dignity was whole and untouched.
This God is the one who stands at the middle of history. The is the one who stands at the breaking point of the storm, and he calls us to stand where He stands, to be involved, to be committed, to be committed to life and death within the storm, and yet neither to accept this fallacy of a ghost in the storm instead of God, or to turn to God and say ‘If you can do nothing more, at least be together with us, in anguish and in despair’. He wants us to take a step, to be in the world at the point which I called ‘the eye of the hurricane’, but not of the world, because we are free from the uncertainty, from the fear, from the self-centredness of Peter, remembering himself at a moment when the whole sea was death and danger for the other disciples, for all the other boats around, and when God stood there as the key of harmony, but it was not the harmony that he expected.
I should like to give you one example of what it means both to make an act of intercession and to stand where our place is. It is the story of a woman of whom we know nothing except the name. She was called Natalie. The story was told me by the other people involved in it. In 1919 at a moment when the Civil War was raging like a storm over Russia, when our cities were falling prey to one army after the other, a woman with two young children was trapped in a city which had fallen into the hands of the Red Army, while her husband was an officer of the White Army. To save her life and their, she hid in a small cabin at the outskirts of the city. She wanted to wait until the first surges were over and try to escape afterwards. On the second day someone knocked at her door towards the evening. She opened it in fear and she was confronted with a young woman of her age. The woman said ‘You must flee at once because you have been discovered and betrayed; you will be shot tonight’. The other woman, showing her children that stood there, said, ‘How could we do that? We would be recognised at once, and they can’t walk far.’ The young woman who so far had been nothing but a neighbour, someone living next door, became that great thing which one calls a neighbour in the Gospel. She grew to the full stature of the Gospel of God, of the good news of the dignity and graciousness of man, and she said ‘They won’t look for you, I shall stay behind.’ And the mother said ‘But they will kill you.’ ‘Yes’, said the woman, ‘but I have no children, you must go.’ And the mother went.
It is not easy, I would say it is almost sacrilegious, to try to imagine what happened in the heart and mind of this woman in the course of the hours that preceded her death. But we can look back to the Gospel and see what happened in the Gospel to those who were the prototype, the archetype of this great and holy woman.
Almost two thousand years before, a young man of her age was waiting for his death. His name was Jesus. He was in a garden wrapped in darkness of the coming night. There was no reason within him why he should die. He was young, healthy; he had done nothing wrong. He was waiting to die in a vicarious way other people’s death. He was waiting in the darkness of the night, and death was coming to kill life eternal itself. Three times he went towards his disciples, hoping for a word that would strengthen his hear, for companionship: not to be released, not to be saved from the oncoming death, but to feel that there was a human presence, compassion, love and awe. The disciples were asleep. He got no help.
Natalie in the coming night, in the gathering darkness, in the cold that was falling from the walls and the roof, had nowhere to turn; there was no-one to whom she could turn. She was alone, facing the coming of another woman’s death that would be enacted in her body, in her destiny. She could have walked out. The moment she passed the threshold, she was again Natalie, not the mother. Two thousand years before on that same cold night when Christ was betrayed into the hands of his murderer, the strongest, the most daring of his disciples was challenged three times, twice by a little maid in the courtyard, once by a group of standers-by; he was not asked ‘Are you Jesus?’ he was told ‘You were with him!’ and three times he said ‘No’, and walked out of the courtyard. Into what? Into security. He turned round and the eyes of Christ met his eyes, and he remembered and he wept. But he walked out. Natalie did not walk out, she stayed inside.
How often must she have thought ‘Is there any hope that at least my sacrifice will be useful?’ Again, two thousand years ago a man was waiting for death, John the Baptist, and before he died, he knew that death was inevitable, he sent two of his disciples to Christ to ask Him ‘Are you He for whom we waited, or shall we expect another one?’ That means ‘If you are Him, then my life of asceticism, my aloneness, my preaching, my imprisonment and death, all the tragedy and hardship of my life, make sense. But if you are not, then I have been betrayed by God and by man, by my own inspiration and by the weakness of the living God. Are you He?’ Christ did not give him a direct answer. He gave him the answer of the prophet ‘Go and tell him what you see – the blind see, the lame walk and the poor proclaim the good new – news about God – news about man.’ The humility of the one and the greatness of the other.
Natalie probably asked herself the same question – was it in vain that she was dying? There was no answer, only the hours passed, the cold of the early morning came and with it, death. The door was brutally opened and they did not even take the trouble of dragging her out. She was shot where she was.
This is the answer which the Christian can give to the tragedy of history. The place where we must stand. Natalie stood where Christ had stood, and where indeed Christ stands now, risen in Heaven with his hands and sides seared with nails and the spear. He stands at the very heart of human history, human suffering, human death, human anguish and tragedy. But He stands there like a rock. He stands there firm, having endured everything, every human suffering in thought and body, and he says to us Christians, ‘That is where you must stand, not in the dreamland of a faith that gives you the illusion that you are already in heaven while you have never been on earth. No, at the heart of human suffering and tragedy but with a faith unshaken, with a certainty that He was expected by Job, has come’. And if we stand there, we may undergo all that was promised by him. You remember the passage: ‘Are you prepared and capable of drinking the cup which I shall drink, of undergoing what I shall go?’ ‘Yes’, said his two disciples. This must be our answer, and when tragedy comes, we must answer again as Isaiah spoke: ‘ “Whom shall I send?” said the Lord. “Here I am, send me.”’ Like a sheep among the wolves; like the Son of God among men.
Source: Chapter 2 of “God and Man” by Metropolitan Anthony Bloom (New York: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1983) 31-47. ISBN 0-088141-024-1
Buy the book on Amazon http://www.amazon.com/God-Man-Anthony-Bloom/dp/0881410241/
Doubt and Questioning Series on YouTube @ http://tinyurl.com/doubtandquestioning
Also a good sermon on a similar topic:
